Irish Catholic Research Articles

Modes of Mindfulness in Post-Catholic Ireland

The Republic of Ireland has undergone a seismic religious and social transformation in recent decades. Through the processes of secularization and detraditionalization, as well as several major scandals within the Irish Catholic Church, irreligiosity has become an increasing reality in terms of the hitherto overwhelmingly Catholic population. At a time of spiritual climate change in this post-Catholic Ireland, the contemporary phenomenon of mindfulness has exploded in popularity across various elements of society. Against this backdrop, three distinctive modes or strands of mindfulness are proposed as being operative in the Irish context, each catering to the needs of different practitioners. The proposed modes include psychological and clinical mindfulness and commodified and post-secular spirituality. Within the lacuna created by the receding of Catholic belief and practice, the emergence of mindfulness in the Irish context is explored, mapping how this originally Buddhist practice has gained such a foothold in contemporary spiritual discourse.

From soldiers to vigilantes: the Catholic Ex-Servicemen’s Association in Northern Ireland on the brink of civil war

ABSTRACT This article assesses the importance of an often-ignored vigilante group; the Catholic Ex-Servicemen’s Association. 1969 saw the mobilisation of Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland who had served in the British Army as part of ad-hoc vigilante groups defending nationalist areas. These groups protected Catholic neighbourhoods from loyalist assault and from incursion by the security forces who were increasingly seen as a hostile force. In 1971, this ex-service personnel formed an all-Ireland organisation: the Catholic Ex-Servicemen’s Association. At their peak in the early 1970s, they claimed a membership of 17,000 and an ability to mobilise a further 20,000 in a ‘doomsday scenario’. CESA’s prominence waned by the late 1970s. CESA has received very little academic attention. This article aims to ameliorate that, supplementing the scant secondary literature with newspaper and archival material to account for the emergence of the Catholic Ex-Servicemen’s Association, analysing their importance in shaping the trajectory of the Troubles and saying something of the complexities of identity in the nationalist community in the early period of the conflict.

FACTORS OF TENSION IN SOCIETY AT THE BEGINNING OF THE NORTHERN IRISH CONFLICT

The article is devoted to the study of the causes of social tension in Northern Ireland in the 60s of the XX century. The author analyzes the social, economic and political causes of disunity and instability in the region. Special attention is paid to the problem of the existence of two ethno-religious communities: Irish Catholics and British Protestants. The economic heterogeneity of society, disproportions in representation in legislative and executive authorities, and the lack of mechanisms for protecting the rights of minorities are considered. These factors, according to the author, contributed to the growth of social tension and radicalization of communities.

From the Periphery to the Center—and Back Again: The Trajectory of British and Irish Catholic History and Historiography

From the Periphery to the Center—and Back Again: The Trajectory of British and Irish Catholic History and Historiography

Bret Harte’s “Ah Sin”: Irish Catholics, Chinese Immigrants, and Heathen Others in “Plain Language from Truthful James”

Bret Harte’s “Ah Sin”: Irish Catholics, Chinese Immigrants, and Heathen Others in “Plain Language from Truthful James”

Religion on the island of Ireland during the Covid-19 pandemic: piety in the public sphere?

ABSTRACT This article examines how religious institutions and religious media on the island of Ireland framed religion’s place in the public sphere during Covid-19. Through qualitative analysis of Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, and Humanist organisations’ public documents and religious media, it finds religious institutions supported government restrictions and adopted secular reasoning to justify their actions. The major churches also avoided claiming special status or religious freedom protections. This reveals a constrained religious input to public debates, reflecting a realistic assessment by religious leaders that they lack policy influence due to long-term declines in church power. The pandemic provides evidence of a reformulation of the relationships between religion, state, and society on the island, albeit with religion retaining more influence in Northern Ireland. Religious media outlets largely reproduced institutional discourses, with the exception of a weekly newspaper, the Irish Catholic. The Irish Catholic argued that stringent restrictions in the Republic of Ireland violated religious freedom, and made a case for the value of piety in the public sphere. But while religious actors still seek to contribute to public debates, there is little consensus or vision about religions’ distinctive contributions, even around existential questions posed by the pandemic.

EVOLUTION OF THE ATTITUDE OF ARTHUR WELLESLEY, 1ST DUKE OF WELLINGTON, TO THE PROBLEM OF CATHOLIC EMANCIPATION

Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington (hereinafter the duke), was a staunch Tory. However, the consequences of the industrial revolution forced him to compromise. Changes in the economy have transformed the usual social order. Factory owners and bankers demanded access to political power. After them, others demanded equality. The duke, who held the post of prime minister, had to face Irish Catholics, demanding lifting of the ban on sitting in the Parliament and holding certain public positions. Thus, the duke in 1829 carried out the emancipation of Catholics, a liberal reform that destroyed the old political system. At the same time, the duke did not change his beliefs. He grew up in Catholic Ireland and knew Catholics. The duke was afraid of the increasing influence of the Catholic clergy rather than the denomination proper. Previously, the duke had put forward various options to neutralise this threat. The duke considered the higher clergy and landowners of other faiths worthy of gaining access to the government of the country. By destroying the old political system, the aristocratic duke took the opportunity to strengthen the dominance of the former elite. The property qualification was increased for Irish voters. The duke agreed to grant the Catholic political rights, since this did not violate the existing social order.

The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume V: Recapturing the Apostolate of the Laity, 1914–2021 ed. by Alana Harris (review)

The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume V: Recapturing the Apostolate of the Laity, 1914–2021 ed. by Alana Harris (review)

The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume IV: Building Identity, 1830–1913 ed. by Carmen M. Mangion and Susan O'Brien (review)

The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume IV: Building Identity, 1830–1913 ed. by Carmen M. Mangion and Susan O'Brien (review)

The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume II: Uncertainty and Change, 1641–1745 ed. by John Morrill and Liam Temple (review)

The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume II: Uncertainty and Change, 1641–1745 ed. by John Morrill and Liam Temple (review)

The Stauntons of Galway in China: Irish Catholic networks and the expansion of the British Empire in Asia

AbstractGeorge Leonard Staunton, who travelled on the first British embassy to China in 1793, and his son George Thomas Staunton, who translated the Chinese legal code into English, are well-known figures in the history of China. Their British identity was constructed by George Thomas to conceal the family's Irish Catholic background, but in fact George Leonard used that background for the benefit of an imperial career that propelled him from Galway to the West Indies, India and, finally, China. It enabled him to win the support of the papacy for the British embassy to China, and his son to learn Chinese and make a career as a merchant and translator. Their story shows some of the mechanisms that connected the nineteenth-century British Empire in Asia to the Catholic Church which had been the great global institution of the early modern age. Moreover, a distinctively Irish concern with property law can be seen to have influenced George Thomas's great work on Chinese law. The Stauntons’ imperial careers made the family wealthy and much of this wealth came back to County Galway.

Black spirituals for Irish evangelicals: the Fisk Jubilee Singers’ Irish tours, 1873–6

AbstractFrom 1873 to 1876, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, an African-American choral troupe from Nashville, Tennessee visited Ireland three times. This article details their experiences and impressions of the country, focusing especially on the relationship they forged with their Irish evangelical sponsors and audiences. While the Jubilee Singers’ story is typically told as an inspirational tale of triumph over adversity, this article argues that there is another way of framing the narrative that emphasises the centrality of evangelical Protestantism to the Jubilee Singers’ mission. The Irish tours brought this dimension into full relief, demonstrating how evangelicalism fostered a degree of mutual understanding between the singers and Irish Protestants while also serving to exclude Irish Catholics. This article also examines audience responses to the Jubilee Singers, particularly the racial and aesthetic concepts they used to describe them. For all that the singers were familiar on account of their faith, they were unfamiliar on account of their race; this tension structured not only Irish responses to the singers, but also the singers’ responses to Ireland.

The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Vol. 1: Endings and Beginnings ed. by James E. Kelly and John McCafferty (review)

The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Vol. 1: Endings and Beginnings ed. by James E. Kelly and John McCafferty (review)

The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume III: Relief, Revolution, and Revival, 1746–1829 ed. by Liam Chambers (review)

The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism, Volume III: Relief, Revolution, and Revival, 1746–1829 ed. by Liam Chambers (review)

Montenegro in the Works of Patrick Mac Swiney de Mashanaglass

Abstract This article analyzes texts about Montenegro of the Catholic Irish publicist Patrick Mac Swiney de Mashanaglass, who visited the country in 1899. He published two works about his experience and the information he collected: a travel account and a historical overview. The article discusses the motive for his arrival on the eastern Adriatic coast, the historical, political, and cultural context of this visit, and the factors that influenced the creation of a certain image of Montenegro in his works. Special attention is paid to the issues of the relationship between Montenegro and the Holy See, which Swiney analyzed from various standpoints, and which contributed to the growing interest in Catholic circles in the small Balkan principality. The key events in that sense were the signing and implementation of the Concordat between Montenegro and the Holy See, the first legal act of this type signed between the Vatican and an Orthodox country, and the political-religious problem that emerged around an institute in Rome dedicated to St Jerome.

The Catholic Church and investor capitalism in late-nineteenth century Ireland

ABSTRACT The Catholic Church embarked upon an ambitious project of property development in the nineteenth century that transformed the Irish built environment and landscape. People responded energetically to fundraising drives for churches, convents, monasteries and welfare-focused institutions. The acquisition of significant property and substantial capital by the Irish Catholic Church was a major source of its power, which continued into independent Ireland. Much of this wealth came to the Catholic Church through bequests, donations, and returns on investment, which were managed by the relevant dioceses and orders. This article focuses on the episcopacy of Archbishop William Walsh of Dublin during the 1880s and 1890s to understand the way in which the management of the archdiocese of Dublin’s financial resources shaped the social, economic, and political development of Ireland’s capital city. By focusing on the management of one of the most significant bequests under Walsh’s supervision – the Egan Bequest – a complex story of religion, investment and infrastructure building is revealed. This activity helped produce a model of investor capitalism that shaped Dublin in ways that remain contested to this day.

A spanish colony made of foreigners: Transimperial Trinidad during the age of revolutions

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the initial transformation of the island of Trinidad into a transimperial contact zone during the final decades of the Eighteenth century and how it became a particularly revealing space for colonial experimentation. This process began two decades before the British invasion of 1797 and originated from the core of the Spanish reformist state that sought to experiment with new political, legal, and economic arrangements for its American domains. The intensification of complex transimperial and transcolonial networks that connected imperial agents in Spain, colonial officials in the Venezuelan coast, local residents in Trinidad, and potential French and Irish Catholic migrants in the Lesser Antilles gave shape to the transformation of Trinidad. This article contributes to the history of the transimperial Atlantic by analyzing the initial phase of Trinidad’s transformation into a plural slave-based colony.

Nineteenth-Century Contextualization of “Race-Religion”

In her wide-ranging article, “An Imperial History of Race-Religion in International Law,” Rabiat Akande delves into the realms of history illustrating how the “race-religion” constellation became formative in current international law, specifically in Western discrimination toward minorities. As Akande writes, “the legacy of that past survives in the continuing interplay of the racial and religious othering of the non-Euro-Christian other.”1 This racialized-religious heritage, for instance, is evident in Western debates on the Hijab, Jewish circumcision (Brit Milah), and various other rituals practiced by religious minorities in the West. As a historian of the nineteenth century, in this essay I mainly focus on Akande's reconstruction of the historical aspect of the “race-religion” nexus. I begin by partially validating Akande's argument concerning the emergence of race-religion during the end of the nineteenth century, and by emphasizing Western racial discrimination against Islam and Judaism—the two “sister Semitic” religions. I then add what I see as important nuances that must be considered in the historical analysis of race-religion. Primarily, I illustrate how race-religion was “fluid” at times, allowing specific groups to “enter” Western civilization, while in other cases, race-religion was rigid, barring the inclusion of groups. Akande argues that the nineteenth century colonial expansion (in Africa, the Middle East, and India) dramatically contributed to the rise of the shared European categories of whiteness and Christianity. This emerging Western identity was antagonistic to the alleged “barbarism” of the non-whites and non-Christians. Nevertheless, further nineteenth-century inner-European contextualization is needed since the exclusion through race-religion also targeted, exactly at the time of this European imperial expansion, other “fellow Christian whites,” such as the Catholic Irish and Poles. It is not only “whiteness” per se that became prevalent, but a specific form of “whiteness” (e.g., Anglo-Saxon, Teutonic, Aryan) that was constantly reimagined and redefined.

Identity of Irish Catholic: Yeats, Heaney, and Barry

Identity of Irish Catholic: Yeats, Heaney, and Barry

Investigating temporal bone variation of colonial populations from St-Lawrence Valley, Quebec: A 3D geometric morphometric approach.

In Quebec, genetic and genealogical research are used to document migratory events and family structures since colonial times, because bioarchaeological analysis is limited by poor skeletal preservation. This article aims to fill this gap by exploring past population structure in the St-Lawrence Valley from the French (1683-1760) and British (1760-1867) regimes using morphological variation of well-preserved temporal bones. 3D geometric morphometrics shape data from seven populations (five Catholics of French descent and two Protestants of British descent; n = 214) were collected from temporal bones. Using Procrustes distances and both MANOVA and Discriminant Function Analysis, morphological differences were measured to calculate affinities patterns among populations. Shape variations were explored with between-group analysis, Mahalanobis distances and quantified by means of Fst estimates using Relethford-Blangero analysis. Despite strong affinities between all Catholic cemeteries, all show divergent morphological regional diversity -especially Montreal and the fortified villages dedicated to its defense. Montreal exhibits low increase in morphological variance over three centuries. As our results show no morphological differences between the Catholic and the Protestant cemeteries in Montreal, this fact may highlight the potential presence of Irish or admixed individuals in Montreal cemeteries after the British takeover. Patterns of morphological diversity highlighted that French colonists did not equally contribute to the descendant populations as reflected by significant interregional variation. Although historical records show that French and English-speaking populations did not tend to admix, morphological affinities between Protestants and Catholics in the beginning of the industrial era in Montreal could reflect the genetic contribution of Catholic Irish migrants. All Catholic cemeteries display distinct morphologies, highlighting differential contributions from French colonists and founder effects, which have increased regional differences. Montreal Catholic (French descent) and Protestant (English colonists) cemeteries show significant morphological affinities at the beginning of the industrial era. The Irish migration following the British conquest may explain morphological similarities observed between Catholic and Protestant cemeteries.